where orders emerge

Another Gem from the New Deal

Marc Levinson offers a splendid history of A&P and of the Robinson-Patman Act’s assault on that company’s efforts to translate its superior efficiencies into lower grocery prices for consumers (“When Creative Destruction Visited the Mom-and-Pops,” Oct. 12).

The Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, although trumpeted as an act to enhance competition, is such a barefaced effort to protect politically influential producers from having to compete against more innovative rivals that it was called by the late Donald Dewey – a usually soft-spoken antitrust scholar at Columbia University – “an execrable concession to small business groups and an insult to the public intelligence.”*